This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Until recently, you could divide internet users into just two categories: bots and people.
Websites have long allowed bots to perform automated tasks, like capturing the content of web pages, but rules govern what they can access and how they behave. The web, after all, is designed primarily for people, even if we occasionally have to solve puzzles and captchas to prove we are not bots. But this is being entirely upended by the release of personal AI agents, which can do things for you online, like booking flights or hotel rooms.
They have recently been unleashed at scale by the launch of apps like OpenAI’s Dots and Meta’s Muse. Muse was downloaded 5 million times in its first month, and agentic web traffic tripled from August to September. The mingling of these agents with human visitors—on an internet designed largely to prioritize people—has gone poorly, with many websites blocking AI agents that consumers have sent to negotiate prices or plan vacations.
Still, if the demand for agents keeps going up, the internet will be increasingly redesigned for them instead of us. Such changes are coming because agents really do mark a third category of web visitor. They’re not humans, of course, and they use the internet at machine speed.
But they’re not quite bots, either, because they’re acting on behalf of individual people to do tasks that can be perfectly legitimate and useful. They just work faster than a person would. Since agents don’t fit into the systems we have for differentiating bots from people, some platforms (especially the more security-conscious ones) have opted to just ban them entirely.
TechCrunch recently reported people having trouble deploying their agents to websites ranging from Pizza Hut to Yelp, which doesn’t allow AI to book restaurant reservations. Amazon has blocked Muse’s agents and is waging a court battle against the AI startup Perplexity to block its agents too. Though a judge recently ruled in favor of Perplexity, Amazon has filed an appeal in which it argues that AI agents threaten its advertising business by making it harder to distinguish between ads seen by humans and those served to bots.
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